Rogue Magic, Free Novel, Chapter 49

This novel will get posted here a chapter every Friday or Saturday, or occasionally Sunday. If you contribute $6 you shall be subscribed for the earc and first clean version in electronic format. I think it will probably take another three months to finish. Less, if I can have a weekend to run through and get ahead of the game. It hasn’t happened yet.

Well, and if the king of fairyland thought I was going to play games with him through the labyrinthine winding madness of his realm, he was well and truly insane, having accomplished in a very short time what all his predecessors had taken decades, sometimes centuries to accomplish.

It came to me as a passing thought, that Fairyland might not devour other planes, as we’d once thought, but it surely devoured its king, body and soul. I wondered why, and if anything could be done about it. Though perhaps it was too late for poor Gabriel.

Or perhaps not. The thing is, I’m not a psychological magician. Never was. Takes the sort of man who likes studying, which I never really did. Someone like my brother in law, the Earl of Sydell, who would rather read than eat. Or drink for that matter. And who found mathematics more intoxicating than alcohol.

I wasn’t that kind of man.

But at any rate, whatever the king thought I would do, I’d never done anything that I was supposed to do, certainly not at school, certainly not after.

I stared at the place where Gabriel had disappeared, as a bright, clean, strange thought came to me. I should let him stay lost. In fact, I should disappear.

There is this mind I’m cursed with, this confused thing I use for thinking. Other people go from point a to point b, and quite often to point c. My mind goes from point a to point z and then I have to find what lies between. Quite often I can’t, but point z is still, nonetheless, the place to be. And in this case I was there.

I was there, wondering why I should want to get the king here, and why the king should have planted a magical bomb on me. That magical bomb would have destroyed Seraphim, yes, but more importantly…

I looked at Ginevra. The magical bomb would have destroyed Ginevra. Gabriel could, perhaps, be sure that I’d go to Seraphim, if his bomb led me there, but what he could be sure more than anything else, was that I’d go to Ginevra, or die trying.

The funny thing is that I don’t think it was a glamour she’d laid on me, or even a purposeful spell. I thought it was just and simply that I’d fallen for her at first sight.

Now, you’d think that being in love with her, I wouldn’t dream of accusing her of terrible crimes, right? You’d think that being in love with her, I’d think her perfect and simon pure.

But they say like calls to like, or else, extreme opposites. I knew she was an agent for the mythworld, and I suspected her soul was even more tainted than mine. So she wasn’t the perfect angel of purity that you’d think I’d have fallen in love with, if I were going for my opposite.

It remained then that she was my echo, my mirror twin, only in a mythworld where her powers were things I could only guess at.

A look at her out the corner of my eye, showed me that she looked anxious, interested, and as though she would personally dive after the king.

I grabbed for her wrist. “Miss Mythborne, Madam,” I said. “It is high time and beyond you revealed to me why you brought us here.”

“I didn—”

“Madam, I’m a drunkard and a rake, but I’m not a fool. The three are not the same. I request only one thing of you, madam, and that is that you tell me why you brought me here, and what game you’ve been playing all along. I will no longer be your dupe, and if you do not answer me, I’ll have nothing at all further to do with you, and love you or not, from now on I’ll consider you my mortal enemy.”

Her lower lip trembled. She shook. And suddenly she had resort to the last, most powerful weapon of humankind.

Well, they can, just not all the time, or forever… My hubby can manage a very impressive sadface (never used seriously and always in the spirit of silly) and our son has inherited it. It requires a certain set of facial characteristics and attitude to pull off properly, the most important of which are huge, emotion-filled eyes.